Hardware/Software Techniques for DRAM Thermal Management

The performance of the main memory is an important factor on overall system performance. To improve DRAM performance, designers have been increasing chip densities and the number of memory modules. However, these approaches increase power consumption and operating temperatures: temperatures in existing DRAM modules can rise to over 95?C. Another important property of DRAM temperature is the large variation in DRAM chip temperatures. In this paper, the authors present their analysis collected from measurements on a real system indicating that temperatures across DRAM chips can vary by over 10?C. This paper aims to minimize this variation as well as the peak DRAM temperature.